


Cinnabons

by Paradigmparadoxical



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, rating is for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 00:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17735174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paradigmparadoxical/pseuds/Paradigmparadoxical
Summary: Emma discovers that Rumple doesn’t have an apartment number for Baelfire before they leave Storybrooke, and grills him for a little more information.  He shows her that drawing of Bae that Belle saw in the Dark Castle.Emma had her phone out, thumbing through screens.  Where was that app?  “Lemme get a copy of this aged, okay?”  She offered him a half-smile.  “We used to have to wait days for this.  Now….”She gasped.  Her stomach lurched.  “No.”





	Cinnabons

**Author's Note:**

> Beta read by the amazing @winterswanderlust (killerkueen on Ao3). None of this would exist without her.

“So, where are we going?” Henry asked from just behind her shoulder.

“Logan International Airport,” Gold replied blandly. He’d had the pedals in his car switched around so he wouldn’t have to drive with his right foot. Emma was glad they would not be driving all six hours to New York; no way would she remember where the brake was if she needed to switch with him.

Come to think of it, she’d never seen anyone else drive Gold’s car.

She wanted to roll her eyes. “I think he meant - after that.”

Gold reminded her of someone she’d known once, but she couldn’t figure out quite who it was.

“Let's just take things one step at a time, shall we?”

But Emma wanted to know as well. It turned out that Gold had an address, but no apartment number.

“I’m afraid the globe doesn’t work that way, Miss Swan.”

He’d left it behind in any case; it would be useless outside of Storybrooke.

She held her breath as they crossed the town line, hoping against hope that Gold’s talisman would work.

It worked.

“He’s not expecting you, is he?”

“You could say that.”

She groaned. “Do you have a picture, anything?” No cameras in fairy tale land. “A drawing?”

He did. It was in his jacket pocket, an interior one where it was safest. It was brown and tattered at the edges, and she wondered just how old it was.

Gold hesitated to pass it over, so she touched his arm instead.

“May I?”

He swallowed, but released it to her. His gaze followed it, and she worried he would not watch the road.

She took the drawing from him gently, her eyes already scanning it. Henry peered curiously over her shoulder.

“I’ve no way of knowing how old he is now,” Gold said. His fingers flexed as though ready to snatch the drawing back at a moment’s notice. “All I know is that he’s alive, there.”

“Huh. So he could be an old man.”

There was something familiar about the boy in the picture. Perhaps it was only the resemblance to his father.

“I need to find him, Miss Swan.” His voice cracked.

Emma had her phone out, thumbing through screens. Where was that app? “Lemme get a copy of this aged, okay?” She offered him a half-smile. “We used to have to wait days for this. Now….”

 _Click-click_. “There’s better programs, but-”

The picture was loading, transitioning slowly through years. Familiarity shifted, became razor-sharp.

She gasped. Her stomach lurched. “No.”

The car swerved, righted itself.

“Miss Swan?”

“Hey, I’d like to get there in one piece,” she snapped.

A muscle in his jaw twitched, the desire to pull over and interrogate her clearly warring with the need to get to the airport for their flight.

She dropped the phone into her lap. “I know him.”

“How?”

“He’s-” She couldn’t say it, not with Henry in the backseat. When Gold glared, she flicked her eyes in that direction. How did one tell their ex-boyfriend’s father the nature of one’s relationship with his son? Hoping the reference would slide past Henry, she said deliberately,

“I... _knew_ him.”

Henry piped up from behind her. “From a case?”

Emma did not want to do this. She did not want to be here. She wanted to take Henry and run back to Storybrooke, where ghosts from her past could not follow.

“Long before that,” she answered. She gave the drawing back to Gold; she didn’t need it now.

No chance that Henry would sleep through the drive to Boston’s airport. He was wired and full of sugar, all but bouncing in the backseat.

“Seatbelt, Henry.”

Maybe when the sugar wore off. No one had really gotten that much sleep last night - this morning, rather.

Neal’s picture was carefully tucked away.

“When?” Gold asked.

He had understood, then.

“Just before I went to jail.”

He winced, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. His eyes found Henry’s in the rearview.

Slowly he said, “There are no coincidences, Miss Swan.”

Fate (destiny or what-have-you) had screwed with her enough.

“Did he know I was from there?” Try as she might, she couldn’t keep the hurt from her voice.

There was silence. “I don’t see how he could.”

“Did you?” There was an edge to her tone now, a building hysteria.

He shot her a look.

Very quietly, “If I had known that my boy cared for you, you would never have gone to prison.”

“You were cursed, Gold.”

And yet he’d been able to reach outside the town to facilitate Henry’s adoption. She still wasn’t sure how that had come about.

He smiled like someone viewing a work of art they’d created, finding it without flaw.

“There were two names that I made a trigger for my memories: Yours, and Bae’s.”

She let that filter through her, staring out the window, cows and pines speeding by.

“Neal left,” she said dully.

“Neal,” Gold repeated, grasping on to the identity his son had formed for himself in this world.

Emma shook her head. “Not Baelfire, not here. He wouldn’t have wanted to stand out like that.”

This was insane. And yet, the longer she looked, the more she could see Neal in his father.

“He left,” she said again.

The red leather wrapping the steering wheel creaked. “I left him.”

At some point, Henry had gone to sleep. Just to be sure, Emma said, “I think we should stop at Cinnabon.”

Gold looked at her askance. She jerked her head to the backseat.

“My grandson?” It was soft, despite Henry’s lack of reaction to her suggestion.

“Yeah, maybe.” She was having trouble wrapping her mind around that one. She remembered Mr. Herman’s horrifying response to Ashley‘s baby, and the pressure he’d put on his son to repudiate mother and child.

Gold kept glancing in the rearview mirror, and Emma wished he hadn’t switched the pedals around. Or that they’d taken the bug, although with her luck it would have been pouring smoke on the side of the highway by now. Gold’s antique Cadillac purred as it consumed the miles. It didn’t smell like last month’s take-out or old socks.

“Thanks for waiting for him to pass out,” she said. “I’m really not ready to tell him.”

“What did you tell him?”

She leaned back against the seat, studied the pristine ceiling. Henry was truly out cold if he hadn’t responded to Cinnabons. “That his dad was a firefighter, Gold.”

Humor and pride laced Gold’s voice. “If he’s Baelfire; you can’t have been too far off the mark.”

“We were thieves,” she said shortly.

He blinked, and his shoulders fell. It was as though she’d kicked a puppy, but that couldn’t be right - he was Mr. Gold.

She thought at times he’d almost been an ally, but having never had one, he didn’t know how to be one. He was suspicious and wary of everyone, except Belle. Perhaps even Belle.

Emma had been there, once.

Less harshly, “Where would I start? We met when I attempted to steal his stolen car.”

“His what?”

“The bug. He was asleep in the back, and I was halfway down the road before he clued me in.”

She knew her juvie record had been smeared all over the newspaper, but there were things that had never made it into that file, things the cops never knew about.

“Will you tell me?” Gold asked. There was none of his former aggression now, and his tone was nearly pleading. What he wanted couldn’t be gotten by intimidating her.

But Henry was still asleep and she couldn’t be sure when he would wake, or if she would notice when he did, if she continued talking about Neal.

“Let’s wait to find out if I’m right, shall we? I wouldn’t want to go on like this if I were not.” It was possible, surely. Maybe.

Now she thought she’d taken away the puppy’s favorite chew toy. She changed the subject.

“Why are you nervous?”

He denied it.

Emma waited him out. They had another hour before they would get anywhere near the airport, but the waiting game only worked if the person one was speaking with gave a damn what one thought. She hoped she’d made that much of an impression.

Resting in the curve of the wheel, Gold’s fingers rubbed together, and at last he sighed. “I am nervous because I know I can never make up for abandoning my son.”

Huh. Maybe Gold wasn’t so much of a bastard.

Henry was still asleep.

“Well, yeah,” she said slowly, earning a sharp glance from Gold, “Mary Margaret and David knew that too. In the end, that’s what made the difference to me.”

“Alas, the circumstances surrounding our… separation weren’t quite so noble. I don’t... I can’t expect Bae to feel the same as you did. The most I can do is try to make up for it, even though I know I can’t.”

Gold’s world ran on a balance of ledgers and debts.

“But that’s just it,” she argued. “It wouldn’t be enough, and they got that. I can’t say I’ve forgiven them entirely, but it went a long way toward helping.”

Gold shook his head.

Emma could never say this to her own parents, but perhaps she could say it to Neal’s father.

Neal’s father. Her brain hurt.

“So here’s the thing about abandonment,” she tried, “We still want that person back, or we wouldn’t be angry in the first place.”

A long, shuddering breath, and he looked over at her… like he knew. And she knew. Gold wasn’t whole, like David and Mary Margaret were. Or Kathryn, or Ruby. He had that edge to him, that wary cynicism that said he had to look out for himself, because no one else ever had. When they should have.

“You’ve been there,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

~

There was some time before their flight would depart. Emma steered Henry’s glucose-laden attention away from Cinnabon, and Gold found a restaurant that seemed up to scratch, all dark colors and quiet elegance, the din of the airport somehow shut away.

 _Terribly uncivilized_. Emma felt oddly embarrassed to have a stranger to her world subjected to the gauntlet of airport security.

They discovered that Gold had a taste for mutton, though he ate little. He’d been a sheep farmer once, he said.

“With Baelfire?” Henry asked.

Gold’s fork skidded across his plate; Henry’s cheerful curiosity wavered.

“Yes, with Baelfire,” Gold whispered, as though his son’s name pained him. He set the fork aside, giving up the pretense.

“Comfort food?” Emma murmured, and he grimaced.

Henry wanted to know what comfort food was.

“Like hot cocoa,” was her brief reply.

“Or Cinnabons?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, yes.”

~

Emma let Henry get his own pastry, and stood with Gold within eyesight of the line.

She attempted to apologise. “Henry’s got a bit of hero-worship going,” she said ruefully.

“He does that, doesn’t he? It won’t hurt him to look up to his mother at this age.”

Emma tried to decide if Gold were deflecting.

“No, you.”

Gold stared at her in confusion.

Emma shrugged. “That’s why, you know… the questions.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sorry.”

~

“UPS package for four-oh-seven?”

 _Click_.

“Maybe you shoulda said Fed-Ex,” Emma’s wise-guy offered.

There was a metallic rattle outside.

No way in hell.

“Watch Henry,” she said, and bolted out the door.

Four flights of fire stairs meant a very short chase once Neal dropped from the last platform. They both crashed to the pavement, skidded hard on the sleet that covered every surface, and fetched up against an empty bicycle rack.

Her leg slipped between the posts; her body did not slow.

 _Crack_.

“Emma?” Neal’s face, a strange mix of joy and worry, swam into view.

“Owww,” she said.

“Bae?”

Neal, already pale, went white as a sheet, and she knew that he knew that voice. He feared it, and put himself between her and it. Wide, familiar eyes, shaking hands, her name on his lips, his body crouched protectively over her.

_If he’s Baelfire; you can’t have been too far off the mark._

This was the same person who had left her to rot in jail?

“Mom!”

Neal gaped like a fish. Emma half expected to see him grow gills next, given all the other weirdness lately.

The pain, centered around her upper leg, was getting worse, as if her own muscles were pulling the bone apart. Something shifted. She screamed.

“Henry.” A phone was shoved into her son’s hands. “Medics, nine-one-one, can you do that?”

Neal rose and rounded on his father, a towering rage seething from him.

“Fix this,” he growled, the only person she had ever heard address the Dark One so. He’d been afraid, a moment ago - she knew he had.

Gold’s voice sounded very small. “I can’t. Not here.”

Neal’s fury ground to a surprised halt, simmered with suspicion.

“Bae, please.”

“Did she get hurt helping you to find me?” The question was very soft, and then Neal turned his back on his father, knelt on the damp brick pavement next to her, her face in his hands. The cold seeped through her clothing; his palms were warm.

“Emma, please don’t tell me you made a deal with him.”

Emma scowled and reached for Gold, who had followed right behind Neal. He gave her his hand, long fingers holding hers gently.

Gold’s world ran on a balance of ledgers and debts, and (she was now discovering) sharply divided between family and not-family.

What was she now?

_Nine-one-one, please state your emergency?_

She hurt with every breath, and squeezed Gold’s hand. He squeezed back, much stronger than she would have thought he could.

“Her deal with me is done,” he said.

Neal’s words were a betrayed squeak, his hold on her loosening. “You brought him here?”

“Hey!” Emma snarled, jerking out of Neal’s hands, and bit back another scream.

Ow. Movement was bad.

“Emma,” Gold said, interrupting their argument, “I can make it stop hurting quite so much, if you’ll let me.”

Henry peered up at the street sign above them, read off the names to the operator.

“You said you couldn’t,” Neal hissed.

“Not like that, not _here_.”

Gold’s solution turned out to be nothing more than a long, steady pull on her foot. There was another shifting, and the pain stopped.

Mostly, so long as neither of them moved too much.

“Umm…” Henry was watching them with a worried frown. “The lady on the phone just said not to move Mom.”

Right, paralysis and all that loveliness, but-

“If we caused any of that kind of damage, I can fix it later,” Gold assured him in an undertone. “The doctors here don’t know that.”

It still hurt like every other time she’d broken something, ten times worse, but Neal held her on the frozen ground from behind, his cheek in her hair, her foot in Gold’s hands.

However angry she might be, Neal felt _good_. God, she’d missed him.

Henry was talking on the phone again.

“...broke the femur,” Gold was explaining. Because once broken, her own muscles had pulled it out of alignment.

Ow.

“How do you know?” she slurred.

Gold hesitated, and Neal snorted in her ear, arms tightening around her waist. Finally he admitted, “I’ve seen more broken bones than you would ever believe.”

She believed it now.

Henry took the phone from his ear for a moment, looked at Gold. “They’re on their way. They want me to stay on the line, okay?”

Gold smiled. “Very good, Henry.”

Neal’s attention shifted to Henry, now that the crisis had passed. Emma tilted her head back into him, felt him edge closer at the unspoken invitation. Everything hurt, and she wanted more of him.

Because that’s the thing about abandonment... we still want that person back, or we wouldn’t be angry in the first place.

Gold watched them, his sharp eyes fixed on that point above her shoulder. Caught between them, Emma was stunned at the openness Gold showed to his son - and by extension her, though she might as well have not existed. It was as though the human man she’d seldom glimpsed was bottled up and reserved for Neal alone, the reason there seemed to be none left over for anyone else.

They’d all heard Henry call her ‘Mom.’ Neal’s question came right by her ear, stirring her hair with his breath:

“How old are you, kid?”

Henry looked up from the phone, puzzled. “I’m eleven.”

Neal swallowed against her back, words hoarse like gravel.

“He’s eleven?”

Bewildered, Henry asked, “Mom?”

Neal persisted with a doggedness that rejected denial, did not allow for it, didn’t _want_ it, a tentative hope and an aching grief.

Haltingly, “Is this my son?”

Henry stared, wide eyes fixed on the stranger holding his mother.

“No,” he protested. “My dad was a fireman. He-he died.”

What had she done?

Across from her, Gold adjusted his grip on her foot, his brows drawn inwards.

Henry fell to the ground beside her, heedless of the damp that seeped into his trousers. The phone lay in his lap, forgotten.

“That’s what you-you told me,” he pleaded.

She’d hurt him.

“You said….”

She took his hand, held on to him.

Neal’s voice, cracked and broken, sounded nothing like what she would have expected of the man who had abandoned her.

“Is this... my son?”

Pride and love brought tears stinging to her eyes.

“Yes.”

Henry shook his head and tugged away; she held him long enough to caution, “Don’t go far.”

Just to the wall of the nearest building then, his head bowed, the phone at his ear.

She felt Neal’s shuddering breath, his lips in her hair. “I’m sorry, Emma.”

It wasn’t okay, but her eyes met Gold’s, and he understood. _Never enough_. She wove her fingers with Neal’s, pulled him tighter around her as though he could hold her together.

She wanted to shout and rail, but didn’t dare move.

“Why?” she asked instead.

Neal sighed. “When I went to sell the watches, I ran into a friend of yours. August.”

Gold stiffened at the name, and Emma made a sound like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.

“You left me… and let me go to prison because Pinocchio, what, _told_ you to?”

“Emma-”

“I loved you,” she whispered.

Gold looked away, perhaps to give his son what privacy he could.

“I was… I was trying to help you,” Neal muttered.

“By letting me go to jail?”

“By getting you home.”

Henry’s curiosity couldn’t keep him away long. His trousers already damp, he settled next to Gold and asked, “You can fix Mom at home, right?”

“Well, yes,” Gold said, Emma’s foot still in his hands, “but your mother won’t be getting on a commercial plane anytime soon.”

Neal shifted, carefully. “Don’t they have to put this kind of thing in traction for a while?”

“I would imagine so. There's always private medical transport, now that strangers can get into the town.”

“And morphine,” Emma said. The last time she’d felt anything close to this was when she’d had Henry.

Gold’s mouth quirked.

“How is it that this land has magic when it didn’t before?” Neal asked suspiciously.

Emma didn’t think he was going to like the answer at all. Apparently neither did Gold; he confessed like a man signing his own execution.

“I brought it here, to find you.”

Emma heard Neal’s headshake. “August found me, when the curse broke. He sent me a postcard-” he trailed off at the expression on his father’s face.

“August tricked me into giving up the dagger,” Gold said quietly.

Neal sucked in a breath. “He what?”

“Temporarily. He said he was you. I _wanted_ to believe he was you. I would give it to you, if that’s what it took, Bae. I know… it can never be enough, but I would do anything for you.”

Neal’s cheek pressed into her hair. When his breathing steadied, he said, “Emma and Henry are family, Papa.”

Gold stared. His fingers flexed. “Yes,” he agreed raggedly. “Please, Bae.”

The paramedics showed up then, and Gold accompanied Emma and Henry to the hospital. Neal would be along soon. There was something he had to do.

It all seemed to take forever, when in fact it was only minutes spent on that freezing pavement, and then they were away.

~

Lower Manhattan Hospital’s cafeteria had hot cocoa, but no cinnamon. This was a travesty. Henry traded places with Baelfire and settled into a hard plastic chair next to Emma with a paperback.

“I had nightmares about you,” Baelfire said. He’d swung by the airport hotel for dry clothing from their things, but the hospital’s staff wasn’t saying when Emma might be let off of that stretcher. Liability frightened these people more than Rumplestiltskin ever could, even if his son were not watching.

Radiology was booked, which was why Baelfire and Rumplestiltskin were out here, wandering the corridors.

“I’m sure I can guess,” Rumplestiltskin murmured.

Baelfire was taller than him by several inches, a fact that caused them both some disorientation whenever they happened to glance at the other.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” Baelfire said, “from before. You clean up nice, though.”

“Thanks much,” he grumbled.

Baelfire came to a sudden stop. “Do you still look like you, in Storybrooke?”

“Are my teeth rotting and does my skin resemble a three day old corpse?”

An elderly woman walking past eyed them strangely. Baelfire smiled cheerfully in her direction.

“Only two people have ever been able to see past that, Bae. No, fortunately that aspect did not follow me to this land.”

They found a sketchpad and pencils in a gift shop, and settled into a corner of the ER, fresh white pages filling with faces, Baelfire’s coworkers, Granny Lucas, a man who ran a deli at the intersection of Canal and Broadway, Emma’s mother, one of Baelfire’s neighbors, and Belle.

Her portrait took longer than the others, Rumplestiltskin shading in the curve of an eye, the apple of her cheek.

“Is she the second person, Papa?”

He’d got lost in the process; he looked up.

Papa.

Baelfire repeated the question, as though he hadn't heard him. Perhaps he _had_ forgotten it.

Rumplestiltskin’s finger touched the page, stroked along her cheek as though he could reach her through the barrier of paper.

“I think she always saw past the curse, from the very first day.” He looked up at his son. “She broke one of my teacups, in my castle. She was...” he swallowed, the words that had so alarmed Belle falling painfully from his tongue, “she was worried she had angered me.”

Baelfire grimaced.

“She said,” his brogue shifted to imitate Belle’s rounded ‘a’s, “‘ _You can hardly see it_.’”

He sketched her cup, the gap in the side the size of a dime. Baelfire laughed.

“She sounds like an Aussie?”

“Aye.”

“You kept the cup, didn’t you?”

Rumplestiltskin smiled, his heart lightening with every word his son allowed him. “I kept your baby things, too. Belle found them. She found... everything.”

His pencil filled in more of her hair, rich curls that tumbled about her cheeks in wide curves. Back to her eye, and a hint of her mischief began to form in the shape of it.

“Is she family?” Baelfire asked.

“Yes. She doesn’t remember.” The pencil stopped, shifted unhappily. “Bae, I can’t stay. Every moment I am here is another where she could be hurt.”

Baelfire’s disappointment both crushed and warmed him.

“I will get Emma and Henry back to Storybrooke,” Baelfire promised.

Hope nearly choked him. “You’re coming?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

Rumplestiltskin looked away. His knuckles whitened around the pencil now wrapped in his fist. Baelfire removed it from him before he could break it, then broke him with just a few more words:

“You and Emma and Henry are my family, Papa.”

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see past the tears clouding his vision.

“Nothing keeps you here?”

Baelfire shook his head. “Up until this afternoon I was engaged. Broke it off,” he said, oblivious. He kicked the leg of the vinyl sofa sheepishly. “Had a prior commitment.”

“Did she take it well?”

“Yeah. It was weird.”

“It was foolish to try to fly here,” Rumplestiltskin said. “Emma kept me from losing my memory when we went through the airport security. I would have been lost otherwise.”

She’d called him her father as well. It was only to soothe ruffled feathers, but no one had spoken of him that way in centuries. It had been… unsettling.

How ironic to find the charade to be so close to truth.

Rumplestiltskin had not removed Baelfire’s shawl the entire evening; Baelfire tugged it. It was his, after all.

“This?” he asked. The Dark One’s son knew exactly why such an item might become a focal for magic. “It’s looking a little worse for wear. You kept it all this time.”

The last was said softly.

Rumplestiltskin smiled and passed over the sketchpad. “I would imagine that bathing will become difficult if I were to stay here for too long.”

The door opened, and every head in the room turned in its direction. It was the tenth repeat of this in the last hour.

“Mr. Nguyen?” a nurse called.

Baelfire flipped to a new page, the pencil tapping rapidly before setting an outline onto its surface. Unlike the others, this was not a good memory, and was picked out in harsh lines and sharp edges, short strokes and unblended shadows.

While it was true that Rumplestiltskin never forgot a face, and his son had inherited that gift (or curse, considering the faces that haunted them), they needed a little more than a brief acquaintance for this old pastime of theirs.

The image marring the clean white surface was set down entirely too efficiently to have come from that single incident.

Horror knotting in his stomach, he stilled Baelfire’s hand.

“You met this boy once before. Bae,” he touched the page, “where did you know him long enough for this?”

The pencil slipped and slid, then fell, clattering, to the floor. Baelfire’s hand wrapped around his; the other slowly tore the page from its coils, crumpled it, and stuffed it into a corner of the sofa.

His head bent to rest on Rumplestiltskin’s shoulder, the dusty shawl fluttering under his breath. In a sterile hospital waiting room, where injury and illness kept constant company with loss, no one gave the pair of them a second glance, or disturbed them.

Rumplestiltskin pulled him close, set the book aside. Daringly, his fingers scratched in the hairs at Baelfire’s nape, travelled up the back of his head, and cupped it in his hand.

A small scream muffled itself in his shoulder, and Baelfire pressed closer. Rumplestiltskin held him tighter, opened up every sense he possessed to the scent of his boy, the color and texture of his hair, the firmness of scalp and muscle under his fingers, and the sound of his breathing when it slowed.

“Centuries I’ve wanted this,” he whispered. “I am so sorry, Bae, and I can never, ever make it up to you.”

Baelfire sagged against him, and it was some time before he stirred.

“You used to try to use magic to fix everything,” he said, sounding puzzled. He sat up to look at his father, but didn’t pull away.

“I could make you fourteen again,” Rumplestiltskin suggested, as though he were merely teasing the boy he’d lost, “turn the clock back.”

Baelfire snorted, stifled the laughter which would be jarring to others in the room. “Are you insane? I don’t want to be fourteen again!”

But Rumplestiltskin had missed those years. Baelfire was a man grown now, and he had not been there for him.

He allowed the teasing tone to fall away.

“Anything you wanted, Bae. It wouldn’t be enough-”

He knew this, right down to his bones.

“-but I could still try, if you’d let me.”

The door opened.

“They’re taking Mom to get x-rays,” Henry said. “They didn’t want me by myself.”

“Did they give her any pain meds?” Baelfire asked.

Henry shook his head, and Baelfire’s eyes darkened.

“I could-”

“No, Papa.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “This is normal for this land. Even if you could get them to treat her sooner, it would just mean that someone else would be kept waiting for theirs. They’re not being horrible on purpose.”

“It looks like it really hurts,” Henry said, “and they won’t let her sit up.”

Baelfire pulled him over to sit between them.

“I know, Sport, but your mom’s a tough cookie. They have to do their x-rays first, make sure there’s no spinal injury or something they’d have to operate on.”

“How terribly uncivilized,” Henry muttered, and Rumplestiltskin choked back a laugh.

~


End file.
